A whoosh of fresh air at lively DuPage Children's Museum

Jake Schmeiser, 7, of Bolingbrook, is in the middle of the action at DuPage Children's Museum in Naperville.

Jake Schmeiser, 7, of Bolingbrook, is in the middle of the action at DuPage Children's Museum in Naperville. (Scott Strazzante/Chicago Tribune)

Heidi Stevens, Chicago Tribune reporter

Let's pretend for a moment that you're raising your kids the way people did in the olden days, before traveling taekwondo clubs and chess club championships and daylong birthday parties at paintball shooting ranges.

In other words, let's pretend you're free on Saturday. (We'll give you a few minutes to stop laughing.)

OK. Ready? So you're free on Saturday and, hey, lucky you! The DuPage Children's Museum happens to have a pretty fabulous exhibit called "How People Make Things," inspired by the factory tours from "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood." And it ends Sunday.

Kids can mold with wax, toggle press a penny, inspect the guts of a sneaker and build a miniature wooden trolley and send it down a shiny wood incline to its spectacular demise. The mission, according to the museum, is to link familiar childhood objects with the manufacturing of said objects, highlighting the intersection of people, ideas and technology.

It works. Minds are stretched. Bodies are in motion. Giggles erupt. And then, just like that, the kids move on to the next loud, colorful, fantastic thing. Which is why it's OK if you're not actually free Saturday. You can visit this museum days or weeks or months after "How People Make Things" has packed up and left town and still find hours of education disguised as fun. Founded by Louise Beem and Dorothy Carpenter, a couple of early-childhood educators from Hinsdale, this 25-year-old treasure has resided in its current Naperville home since 2001. Some 300,000 visitors pass through its doors each year, enjoying three floors of exhibit and play space.

In a landscape dotted with three fantastic children's museums — this one, Kohl Children's Museum in Glenview and the Chicago Children's Museum at Navy Pier — plus the city's world-class museum campus offerings, it manages to stand spectacularly out.

If you've been, you know what we mean.

If you haven't been, it's time. And may we suggest you take in the following:

"AirWorks": Two things that strike us as mind-numbing time-sucks — hair dryers and vacuum cleaners — are endlessly fascinating to children. So an entire room of things that suction and blow and whoosh is nothing short of brilliant. A giant wind tunnel, clear pneumatic tubes that carry balls through a maze of coils, and air wands that offer kids the power to blow gentle gushes of air at each other keep this exhibit filled with a steady stream of laughing, darting little bodies.

"Waterways and Bubbles": Water rooms are, frankly, a dime a dozen in the Chicagoland museum scene: Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, the Museum of Science and Industry and all three children's museums offer kids the chance to forgo the provided slickers, soak their clothes and shoes and leave their parents wondering just how much chlorine it takes to kill the conjunctivitis virus. This place, though, has a giant bubble-maker. Stand in the middle of a ring that soaks in a shallow bubble moat. Yank a rope that tugs the ring into the air. Find yourself surrounded by a slick, soapy wall of bubble. Hard to explain why this is fun, but darn if it isn't.

"Creativity Connections": This is practically an entire museum in itself. A shadow theater lets you strike pose after pose and watch as a flashbulb freezes your shadows onto the white wall behind you. A paint-with-light room lets you write your name, draw a picture or just doodle your heart out with a tiny pen that emits light rather than ink. A series of black-lit honeycombs invite you to create designs with glowing tubes — think Lite Brites, supersized. A percussion room lets you drum, pound and slap objects of all different sizes and shapes.

"Trains: Get on Board": This top-floor exhibit is a temporary one, scheduled to move on this fall. Don't miss it. A model train chugs along a covered track against a giant window overlooking the Metra's Burlington Northern Santa Fe line, which stops just across Washington Street in Naperville. A wooden train set is assembled on a kid-height table with countless track configurations. Train posters, train books, train schedules all dot the landscape. In our estimation, this is the best train destination for kids in Chicagoland, excepting maybe the Illinois Railway Museum in Union. (Which, did we mention, is in Union.)

"Math Connections": So you walk into this area and you see what looks like a giant, foam-covered teeter-totter, and you hop on one side, your kid hops on the other. You do the up-down-whee! thing for a while and then realize: Whoops. This is actually probably a scale, given the giant foam blocks perched next to it, waiting to be weighed and balanced. Along with the fact that it's in a math exhibit. But you are quickly followed by patron after patron with the same hop-on-there instinct, so you're fine. The whole exhibit is like this, in that you start having fun and completely forget you're doing math. "Play with math," urges the accompanying sign. "Set problems and seek solutions. Talk about what you did and how you did it. Explore and play."

No problem. You can count and sort and distribute objects of different shapes and colors against adjustable, mirrored backgrounds, creating your own kaleidoscope of sorts. You can create giant geometric patterns against a wall, using black and red magnets. You can complete shape puzzles. And you can apply a mathematician's eye to some easily recognized works of art: Next to Andy Warhol's "Ten Marilyns," children are asked, "What can you count 10 of? How many Marilyns have yellow hair? How many eyes can you count?" Faith Ringgold's "Church Picnic" asks "How many plates of food can you count?" Jasper Johns' "Three Flags" is there too.

These exhibits are just the beginning, of course. Your kid might get sidetracked by one of the ramp/golf ball contraptions in the "Make It Move" room on the first floor and spend a good 30 minutes making it move. (Ours did.) A staff-led project in the art studio might beckon. The construction house, with its real hammers and nails and saws and vices, might swallow your particular child for a spell. They're all appealing on a number of levels for a number of kids.

Which is why you need to get there. But not necessarily this Saturday.